by Rebecca Done
In that moment, I couldn’t have felt more relieved if I’d been a cardiac patient hearing the doctor say they’d had a fuck-up with the notes and I didn’t need open-heart surgery after all. ‘Oh yeah?’ I said jauntily to Steve, patting his shoulder a couple of times as I moved past him and headed for the kettle. A couple of strong coffees – however chemical the aftertaste – and I might just be able to make it through the morning.
‘Yeah.’ Steve made a machine gun from each of his index fingers and sprayed several rounds into the staff noticeboard. ‘Why didn’t you come, dude? You’d have loved it.’
I frowned. Steve wasn’t fully up to speed on the whole Sonia Laird drama and he wasn’t known for his subtlety either. I decided to gloss over it. ‘Headache.’
‘Jesus. You sound like my girlfriend.’
We both knew that Steve didn’t have a girlfriend, but details like that weren’t important first thing on a Monday morning. I made us both a coffee (foul, just foul), claimed my usual chair near the window and, still wearing my favourite denim jacket with the sheepskin collar, stretched my legs out across the carpet tiles to wait for the start of the Monday-morning staff meeting. I’d put on my cowboy boots today – for luck or something. Somewhere over to my left, I could see Bill Taylor swinging his pocket watch backwards and forwards like a menacing little pendulum.
As the chatter around me continued, I finally felt my little fog of fear begin to lift. All the signs were positive so far – if I could just make it to the end of the day without incident, I could go back home, lock all the doors and spend another few hours refining my defence (as if the situation were no more serious than being busted by my parish council warden for nicking flowerpots from the gardens of kindly dithering pensioners).
When the staff meeting eventually kicked off, it became clear beyond all doubt that nobody had a clue about Jessica and me. I knew this because top of today’s agenda was a decisive show-of-hands on whether the ladies’ staff loos were to be made temporarily unisex until the end of term (the ladies, understandably, were not keen) while maintenance works were being carried out on the gents’ (which all the men knew to be code for industrial-level cleaning) – not the fact that I had been entertaining a pupil in my cottage on Saturday night. I felt fairly safe in assuming that, had it been public knowledge, the latter would have trumped the former on this particular agenda. Then again, Miss Gooch was in charge of setting it, and everybody knew she had an almost pathological hand-washing problem.
Fucking hell, it felt amazing.
Stop thinking about it.
Stop thinking about it.
Now all I had to do was figure out if any of the kids knew, but this would only entail the very lightest of detective work, if any. Sniggers, sly looks and missiles fashioned from an interesting variety of sanitary items would more than give the game away.
I made it through double maths with the lower fourth and morning playground duty without incident. I made it through a lunchtime rehearsal of the sixth-form play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, without incident (unless you counted all the props that kept going missing – so far we’d mislaid two Cossack hats, a fake baby and an entire tin bath). I made it through an early-afternoon session of marking test papers (oh God, hopeless) without incident.
One thing I did not do, however, was make it through the day without thinking an inappropriate thought about Jessica Hart.
It seemed that the more likely I was to escape death by lynching for what had happened, the happier I was to allow my thoughts to wander off-piste, back to my living room and the way I had taken her face and hair in my hands while I kissed her.
I kissed her.
It felt good. Oh, shit. Why did it feel so good?
Now what?
‘Matthew?’
I jumped so suddenly that I flung almost an entire mug of tea over my own lap. It soaked straight through my trousers and stung like shit. I leapt up and virtually into the arms of Sonia Laird, who I now realized had been standing in front of me in the staffroom for the past thirty seconds or so, trying to get my attention by repeatedly whimpering my name.
‘Fuck,’ I growled, much to the disapproval of the grey-haired couple – yes, they were actually a couple – who ran the library. If you happened to be looking for the last word in classification, the Pattersons were it. They could literally stun you with their expertise in cataloguing and index cards. Stun, as in, bolt gun.
Sonia pouted and fluttered about with a grotty-looking tea towel. ‘Sorry, Matthew. I didn’t mean to scare you.’
Reluctantly I took the microbe-infested tea towel from her, mumbling something barely comprehensible about corduroy not being as hard-wearing as you’d think.
‘Sorry,’ she said again, and I wondered then what she was really apologizing for. ‘I just came over to say …’ She lowered her voice. ‘I don’t want things to be “awkward” between us.’ She spoke delicately, as if we were discussing a case of genital warts (hers, not mine). ‘I know you had plans to come to the cinema on Saturday, and I hope you didn’t drop them on my account?’
I swallowed. I’d convinced myself up to this point that I didn’t really care if Sonia cottoned on to the fact that I was avoiding her, but now that she was virtually asking me outright, it seemed a bit harsh to confirm that I thought she was slightly deranged.
‘Headache,’ I muttered, recycling the excuse I’d given Steve for continuity.
I had been trying to dab at my crotch with the tea towel in a way that wasn’t too obvious, but now I stopped. It felt strange to have my hand anywhere near that region of my body at the same time as being in touching proximity to Sonia. Unfortunately, Sonia seemed to interpret this as an open invitation for her to pluck the tea towel from my grasp and offer to take over, so I sat swiftly back down without saying anything else and hoped that she wouldn’t join me.
My hope was short-lived. ‘We could go together, if you like?’ she suggested in a voice that was becoming worryingly guttural as she settled into the chair next to me. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.’
I cleared my throat, which was probably a subconscious effort to encourage Sonia to clear hers. She had evidently arrived at the conclusion that the first time I’d declined to kiss her had simply been an error of judgement on my part. I needed to help her arrive at a different conclusion, namely that it hadn’t been.
‘Don’t you think your boyfriend might have something to say about that, Sonia?’ I asked her as tactfully as I could.
She simpered, offered up a light shrug and put one hand on my knee. ‘Not if I don’t tell him.’
My heart was beating faster now, and not for any reason remotely complimentary to Sonia. Attempting to skin my own legs with boiling water hadn’t helped, and to make things worse, Lorraine Wecks had walked back into the room and seemed to think that the occasion of me and Sonia sitting next to each other warranted a series of unsubtle winks from over by the kettle. Some people can pull off a wink, and Lorraine wasn’t one of them. They were so clumsily executed I couldn’t even tell if they were aimed at me or Sonia.
The whole thing was starting to get out of hand. ‘Should go,’ I muttered.
‘But you’ve got a free period,’ Sonia protested.
I scooped up my book bag and got to my feet. ‘I really need to dry these out,’ I told her, meaning my trousers, which unfortunately only gave her the green light to once again start eyeballing my groin.
I turned the collar up on my jacket, taking care to avoid Lorraine’s convulsing eye, and strode quickly from the room.
Steaming across the playground like an oil tycoon fleeing a leaking wellhead, I was stopped in my tracks by the sound of a voice calling my name. This time, for a change, it wasn’t the vacant mewl of Sonia Laird. This time, it sounded upbeat and excitable.
‘Mr L!’
My heart pounded. It was Jess. She was walking swiftly towards me, wrapped up in a woollen coat and grey knitted scarf, bag slung over one shoulder like she
was ready to go home.
I observed straight away that she didn’t look as if she was about to give me a slap or the heads-up on my arrest warrant. She actually seemed ridiculously happy to see me. I felt awash with relief.
‘You’re supposed to be in PE, Jess,’ I told her, surprising myself with a knowledge of the lower fifth timetable I didn’t know I had.
‘I know, but –’ she held up a bright blue tub of decongestant ointment – ‘having problems with my sinuses.’
Her eyes were shining, her gleaming curtain of blonde hair flipped over itself. She was smiling at me like I was someone who mattered. I was pretty sure that if I had been staring a few years into the future, I would have been looking at the girl of my dreams.
Seriously. Get it together.
I swallowed. ‘You didn’t have any sinus issues the last time I checked.’
I didn’t mean it to come out as dirty as it sounded. Honestly.
She gave a simple shrug and an even simpler smile. ‘Well, you are my teacher … so I can neither confirm nor deny.’
I smiled back. It was becoming clear that I hadn’t needed to dread this moment after all. She was making it stupidly easy on me. ‘I haven’t seen you then.’
‘Thanks, Mr L,’ she said, and that was her cue to depart, except she didn’t. She lingered, shifting her bag on to her other shoulder and gently tossing the tub between her left hand and her right.
It was my turn.
‘Jess, can I have a word?’ I said formally, rubbing my hands together against the cold.
She nodded.
‘In private would probably be best,’ I said, starting to walk in the direction of the drama studio, away from the playground, which for all the three-storey buildings that surrounded it might as well have had a permanent follow-spot trained on to anyone daring to cross it. I kept walking until we reached the side of the studio, where I knew that a well-concealed footpath led into a patch of stiff shrubbery. Against my better judgement, I took it.
After a couple of turns, the path petered out at a wooden bench dedicated to an ancient tap teacher. For Peggy, teacher of tap and modern dance 1977–1989, from her friends. She loved this place.
I looked around the laurel bushes. This place?
Our hideout was concealed from view, and it looked dry. An excellent place to sit down and sort this all out.
‘Have a seat,’ I told her, already mentally defending myself to the person who might happen to stumble across us with, We’re just sorting out her sinus problems.
We both sat down and Jess folded her hands patiently in her lap, generously opting not to question why I deemed all the foliage to be necessary.
I fumbled around with the words in my head for a few moments before saying – in a deep voice that was supposed to convey my regained sense of responsibility but ended up sounding more Leonard-Cohen-with-laryngitis – ‘Saturday night was a mistake, Jess.’
Oh, fantastic. Very original, Landley. A-star for effort.
To her credit, Jess smiled. ‘Have you been practising this?’ Her breath was freezing in tiny little clouds between us.
‘No,’ I said quickly, frowning, ‘why?’
She looked relieved. ‘Thank God. It’s rubbish.’
I went for solemn but ended up laughing. ‘Sorry.’
She settled back against the bench and crossed her legs, probably to help her keep warm. ‘No, don’t be,’ she said, biting her lip like she was really trying hard to take me seriously. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed.’
How can she be so cool about this? When did girls this cool ever exist?
‘Well,’ I said, clearing my throat as she offered me another stab at saying anything that meant something, ‘I shouldn’t have kissed you.’ And then I stuffed my hands into my pockets because I was really starting to feel cold.
She smiled into the folds of her scarf. ‘Wasn’t it me who kissed you?’
True.
No – irrelevant. Get a grip.
I shook my head. ‘Jess, I kissed you back and I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m your teacher. You shouldn’t have even been in my house.’
She looked more serious now. The smile had melted off her face. I wanted to quickly reconstruct it, put it straight back where it belonged.
‘I was the one who knocked on your door, Mr L. It wasn’t like you came looking for me.’
Another tick to confirm my good character. If Jess didn’t think I was a pervert, then maybe – maybe – I wasn’t. ‘The point is,’ I said softly, ‘we made a mistake and we have to pretend like it never happened, okay? There’s a lot of people who’d be really angry about this if they found out.’
Even though she was the person whose opinion should have mattered least to me, Sonia Laird was for some reason in my mind as I said this. Bloody Sonia Laird.
Jess frowned, looked down and picked at a tiny hole in the leg of her black tights. She was starting to shiver with the cold. I wanted to grab her hands and blow some warmth into them. ‘Well, I’m not going to tell anyone,’ she said. ‘But I want you to know that Saturday night was the best thing that’s happened to me all year.’
We both froze as a clatter of footsteps rounded the other side of the shrubbery. Girls were laughing, gossiping about boys.
‘Jess,’ I said as soon as their voices had receded, ‘you shouldn’t say that. You’re young; you’ve got plenty of great experiences ahead of you.’
‘I told you we’re moving to London after Christmas,’ she said, with a slight shake of her head. ‘I’m really going to miss you.’ She looked across at me then, her grey eyes small and sad.
I remembered what she’d said to me about her mother needing to take off to bed for six months. ‘Is your mum going to be okay?’
‘Define okay,’ she said softly, the shadow of a smile across her face.
I didn’t need to attempt it to know that amateur mental health analysis was unlikely to be one of my strengths – but I also didn’t want Jess to think I’d just been asking out of courtesy. She got that all the time: teachers checking up on her with one eye on the clock before they dashed off to supervise hockey practice or back-slap each other for being the world’s biggest egghead.
‘Is it …’ I hesitated. ‘Because of your dad?’ Even as I said it, I knew I should have at least tried to pretend I didn’t actually think things were that simple.
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Actually, my mum was sort of relieved when my dad died. She’d always wanted to travel the world, but he wanted her to have us, so …’ She offered me a little such-is-life shrug. ‘She was finally free.’
Jesus Christ. ‘Who told you that?’
She blinked at me, shivering a little more intensely now. ‘She did.’
‘Jess …’ I struggled to find the words, probably because I’d never before been challenged to find the upside of someone telling her kids she was glad their dad had carked it. So I decided to position it as some sort of good-natured misunderstanding. ‘She didn’t mean it. You know that, don’t you?’
‘She did,’ Jess replied simply, shooting down my ignorance. ‘She tells us all the time.’
‘It’s probably the alcohol talking.’
She smiled. ‘What you’re really thinking comes out when you’re drunk, Mr L.’
Well, if that was true, then I was definitely some sort of child molester.
‘How long has she been like this?’ I asked her, slotting my hands under my thighs and jiggling my legs gently, an attempt to generate some warmth.
‘Forever,’ she said. ‘She fell off a horse when I was five and got addicted to the painkillers. Then she got depression and started drinking. My dad hated it. They were hardly speaking – you know – at the time he died. She only cried at the funeral because she was hung-over.’
For a mother to afford her own comedown more pity than her dead husband or grieving children was not really defensible in my book, so I didn’t even
bother trying.
Fortunately, Jess didn’t seem to be waiting for me to put a positive spin on the behaviour of egotistical lunatics at major life events. ‘I miss my dad,’ she was saying, ‘but it’s made me more determined to follow my dreams. I’m going to be a chef when I leave school.’
Admittedly, I was slightly relieved that her goals didn’t in any way rely on her being good at maths. ‘That’s great,’ I said with feeling. ‘You should do it.’
She smiled and then paused. ‘So what’s your dream, Mr L?’
Caught off guard, I wavered, wondering if her question somehow meant I habitually appeared jaded or pissed off around my pupils. I hoped not, since that would have put me in the same personality category as the unsmiling Derek Sayers and his unwashed comb-over.
‘Er …’ I scratched my chin. ‘Well, I like teaching.’
‘No!’ She brushed my thigh with a fingertip, probably reflexively. ‘I mean … what’s your dream?’
I smiled. It was sort of nice to indulge the thought for a moment that my life’s desire might not actually be to hang around with Sonia Laird and play pretend karate with Steve Robbins all day.
‘Well. To travel, I guess. I always wanted to, but …’ I trailed off then and glanced at her, aware that the last thing she probably needed right now was another adult whining on at her about unfulfilled ambition.
But her eyes were wide. She seemed to be hanging on to my half-sentences like they were the most fascinating thing she’d ever heard.
I couldn’t really come up with a meaningful conclusion that wasn’t something predictable about the Hadley job having been a real opportunity, and not wanting to let Mackenzie down. ‘Life takes over sometimes, Jess. That’s why you need to do this stuff while you’re still young. Which you are,’ I added cheerfully, because I was conscious I’d started to sound a bit like my dad, who spent most of his time complaining about his knees and writing to Points of View.
